International Workshop on Graphics Recognition

August 9-11, 1995
Scanticon Hotel and Conference Center
Penn State University
University Park, PA 16802

In August 1995, IAPR TC-10 organized the First International Workshop
on Graphics Recognition, at the Penn State University's Scanticon
conference center. The goal of the workshop was to bring together
researchers from around the world to assess the state of the art in
the above-mentioned topics. The workshop attendance was limited to 75
persons, to promote closer interaction among participants.
The workshop was organized into five sessions; each of them began
with an invited talk assessing the state of the art, followed by short
research presentations and concluding with a panel discussion, to identify
important open research problems and suggestions for future research
directions. These panel discussions proved to be very interesting,
with much interaction between the authors and all the other
participants.

Here is the list of sessions, with name of state-of-the-art speaker:

Basic Techniques and Symbol-level Recognition (Larry O'Gorman)

Map Processing (Jurgen den Hartog)

Engineering Drawings (Dov Dori)

Applications of Graphics Recognition (Dorothea Blostein)

Performance Evaluation (Robert M. Haralick)

During the workshop, we also organized a contest to determine the best
algorithm for detection of dashed lines in drawings. Formal
performance evaluation protocols and metrics had been defined in
advance, and were used to test the accuracy of detection and
representation of dashed lines. Many groups expressed interest in this
contest and obtained test data but only one group completed their
development and came to the workshop with a working program.
The team headed by Dr. Dov Dori from Technion, Israel, received the
award in this contest.

The social environment of the workshop was also appreciated by the
participants; the location was nice, the food was excellent, and the
workshop closed with a
picnic at
Stone Valley Recreation Park where we had time for non-professional
contests in volley-ball and boating, to name but a few.

At the end of the workshop, all presented papers where submitted to an
anonymous review by two workshop participants, who were asked to
judge the contribution with respect to both the paper itself and the
presentation and the subsequent discussions. A selection of papers was
made through this reviewing process; this selection also includes
a description of the performance evaluation protocol used in the
dashed-lines contest and a paper describing the winner system.
All these papers were thoroughly revised and improved, and published
in May 1996 as a 300-page book.